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Question
One question: Explain (can have an accepted answer) or Open (several argued answers)
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Can someone explain what the Nyāya logicians meant by vyāpti (pervasion)?
My training is entirely in Western formal logic, and I've started reading Matilal's The Character of Logic in India. I understand the standard example: there is fire on the hill because there is smoke, and wherever there is smoke there is fire,…
Started by Tomasz Szewczak4 replies -
I butcher pigs at work and my dog sleeps on my bed. Is that inconsistent?
I'm a chef from Goa, which means pork is close to the centre of the food I grew up with: sorpotel, vindaloo, chouriço. In my kitchen in Dubai I break down whole pigs when we can get them. At home I have…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Can someone explain Ramanuja’s Vishishtadvaita fairly, from an Advaitin’s point of view?
I confess I have never given Rāmānuja the attention he deserves. My Vaishnava friends tell me I misrepresent him whenever I speak about him. So I ask, in good faith: what exactly is Vishishtadvaita, "qualified non-dualism"? How does it differ from Advaita…
Started by Arjun Iyer3 replies -
Can Kant’s rule against treating others merely as means be stretched to cover animals?
I work on wetlands, and in a project meeting last month we argued about whether the birds of a lake have any claim against being drained out of their habitat, or whether only the people who enjoy them do. A colleague, a…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Are Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative really equivalent?
I am working through the Groundwork, slowly. Kant gives several formulations of the categorical imperative: act only on a maxim you could will as a universal law treat humanity, in yourself and others, always as an end and never merely as a…
Started by Henrike Vogel3 replies -
What did Bernard Williams mean by ‘one thought too many’?
A book on care ethics I borrowed keeps quoting Bernard Williams's phrase "one thought too many", and I think I understand it but I want to be sure. As I understand the case: a man can save only one of two drowning…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
Is a mayonnaise emergent? A cook asks about weak and strong emergence
Every morning someone in my kitchen makes mayonnaise: egg yolk, a little mustard and lemon, then oil, drop by drop at first. Get it right and you have something thick, glossy and pale. Get it wrong and you have greasy soup. None…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
What is the difference between my arm rising and my raising it? A capoeirista asks
One of my capoeira students brought me a question from her philosophy class that I can't stop thinking about: what is the difference between your arm rising and you raising your arm? In the roda this matters all the time. A good…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
My students find it obvious that a river can be a person, and I'm trying to understand why so much of Western philosophy finds it strange, and what tikanga might say to philosophy in return. But when I look for a place…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
What does Kant mean when he says laughter is an expectation turning into nothing?
I am reading the Critique of the Power of Judgment slowly, with a pencil, and I have reached the remark after section 54, where Kant suddenly starts telling jokes. I did not expect this from him. His formula, in one standard English…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Why is a banknote money when a perfect copy of it is not?
When Ghana changed its currency in 2007 and took four zeros off the cedi, my mother kept a tin of the old notes. For a while you could exchange them. After that they were just paper. Same paper, same printing, same faces.…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?
I run a kitchen in Dubai, twenty-two cooks, nine countries, and on a slow afternoon I was staring at a gas flame. It keeps the same shape and colour for hours, but nothing in it stays: the gas comes in, burns, and…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Is farming labour or work? Trying to understand Arendt’s distinction
This month my son sent me a chapter about Hannah Arendt, who says English uses "work" for three different things: labour, work and action. I wanted to know which one I do on my farm. From what I understood, labour is what…
Started by Akosua Mensah4 replies -
What do Prior’s four tense operators actually say, in plain words?
The game I'm building now has a time loop: the player relives the same afternoon and has to work out what will happen, what already happened, and what has always been true in the loop. A friend who did a logic minor…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Running a kitchen, I never pick the best option, just the first good one. Is that irrational?
Every morning at six I make maybe fifty decisions before the first coffee: which supplier to call when the fish is late, who covers a sick cook, whether the tomatoes are good enough or go to sauce. I never compare all the…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
I know I shouldn’t shout at drivers who cut me off, and I still do. How is that possible?
When someone cuts in front of my bus at a stop, I shout. I know it does nothing. I know it is bad for my heart, bad for the passengers, and that the other driver cannot hear me. I have decided, many…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
“Natural birth”: does an evolutionary story about a trait tell us whether it is good?
On the maternity ward I hear the word "natural" all day, pulling in opposite directions. Some women are told that birth without intervention is best because "your body evolved to do this". Others are told that labour pain is natural and therefore…
Started by Farhana Akter4 replies -
Are emotions judgments, feelings, or both?
In my emotion psychology course we covered three families of theories: feeling theories, like the James–Lange theory (1880s): an emotion is our perception of bodily changes, so we're afraid because we tremble, not the other way round cognitive or judgment theories, like…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
Bridges too low for buses: what did Winner mean by “artifacts have politics”?
In a short article about philosophy of technology I read about a bridge built too low for buses to pass under, so that the people who travel by bus could not easily reach what lay beyond it. The article said a philosopher…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu3 replies -
Why do philosophers say “in some possible world” instead of just “possibly”?
I design puzzle games, so I spend my days building small worlds with rules. When I started reading about modality I kept seeing sentences like "there is a possible world in which you became a dentist." Why not just say "you could…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
When I stir stock the surface dips. What did Newton’s spinning bucket prove?
I run a kitchen in Dubai. When I stir a big pot of stock, the surface goes down in the middle and up at the sides. I never thought about it until I read that Newton used a bucket of water doing…
Started by Joel D'Souza3 replies -
How can a piece of music be sad when it has no feelings to have?
We have just finished the soundtrack for our new game. In the final level the player has to leave a companion character behind, and our composer wrote a slow piece for it. Playtesters keep telling us the music is "so sad". Some…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies -
My daughter says the thermostat wants the room warmer. Is she wrong?
I spend my days answering my children's questions, and this one stumped me. We were cold, the heating clicked on, and my seven-year-old said, "The thermostat wants it warmer." Her brother said machines can't want anything. They looked at me. I said…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
What is “defeasible” reasoning, and why do people say most good arguments aren’t valid?
I read philosophy on the bus home. Last week I read that "most good real-world reasoning is not valid at all", and the word that kept coming up was defeasible. Here is my problem. In the kitchen I reason all day. The…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
How does rasa theory compare with Aristotle’s catharsis?
I studied rasa theory in my literature classes and Aristotle's Poetics in a single comparative class. My professor said they're answering the same question: why do we enjoy art that shows painful emotions? But I'm not sure. Can someone explain what rasa…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
My new cooks believe everything I tell them about safe temperatures. Do they actually know it?
Every few months a new commis arrives in my kitchen, often very young, and the first week is mostly me telling them things. Chicken has to reach a certain core temperature. Rice left out too long is dangerous. This knife is for…
Started by Joel D'Souza4 replies -
What did R. S. Peters mean by calling education an initiation?
I have started reading philosophy of education because I want to understand what I am doing when I teach them at home in the evenings. An introductory book I borrowed says R. S. Peters, in the 1960s, described education as "initiation into…
Started by Thamarai Raman4 replies -
I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
My job is to shape what players want to do next: rewards spaced so that the next one is always just ahead, social features that make leaving feel like letting friends down, events that expire so you return tomorrow. Some of it…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
I grew up in Tainan and met Wang Yangming in high school, where he was something to memorise: “unity of knowledge and action”, “extend liangzhi”, three marks on the exam. Now I design puzzle games and suddenly find him interesting, because liangzhi…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies